I finally did it.
On finding an elusive book that lived solely in my memory for many years, and a few other things.
I originally wrote this post in August but with so many other things going on in my life I kind of got sidetracked. I just entered my ninth month of pregnancy. I’m 37 weeks and so tired. Things are good though and we’re no longer staying at my mom and dad’s house. Construction is still happening on our house, but with this baby coming we had to get our own place. Since Thanksgiving we’ve been settling into a two-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia’s gayborhood and I’m so happy. We have an elevator and plenty of space, plenty of sunlight. Paulie loves the big window. I love the privacy.
Earlier this year, I performed at Sopranos-themed poetry event, orchestrated by Philly’s biggest poetry enthusiast Peter Webb. Being a fan of Sopranos, I felt incredibly inspired and after brushing up on some of my favorite episodes, and reading about them on Soprano’s Autopsy, I wrote a slew of new material. Mostly inspired by Adrianna LaCerva. Of course I dressed up like her.
The event was really fun, and my work got a good response from the audience. Since then, though, I’ve been trying to get the Sopranos-themed poems placed in lit journals to no avail. When I was solicited to send new material for the fourth issue of Neutral Spaces Magazine, I sent along some of my favorite Adrianna poems, and was pleased that “Remember When is the Lowest Form of Conversation” was selected.
You can read the whole issue here.
You ever read a book, perhaps in childhood, and something about it just sticks with you, but remains otherwise elusive? Like you totally remember the vibe of the story, and the way it made you feel, and none of the identifying details so when you grow up and want to find that book again it’s an almost impossible task? Over the years, I’ve procured many of these books, from early childhood (what was that book that I read about the Phantom of the Opera, detailing his early life as a yellow-eyed boy who worked in a traveling side show?), to middle school (what was that book I read about the high-school aged boy who moves from a Caribbean island to somewhere in New York City where he meets a cute girl who wears the same pair of clean starched jeans everyday and a friend who agrees that you can live in a cave and still keep it tidy, in relation to the shabby housing they both live in, and eventually stabs a bully in the guts one day and it feels "like a soft plum" then runs out of school and jumps over the subway turnstile and spends the rest of the day living in a flashback of his days waking up early with a cup of hot chocolate to get him through his workday and cutting down sugarcane and drinking rum with his friends at night by a waterfall), to college (what’s the name of that modernist novel I read in my modernist fiction class that’s set in Europe between WWI and WWII following two poorer people, a man and a woman who may be con-artists, though they may just be artists, and their new rich friend who they are using for money, who is using them for cool points, who they meet in a park one day and realize that they all get along so they start traveling around together, and perhaps there is a love triangle happening somewhere?).
I think of these books often. Maybe it’s because I don’t remember all of the details, and not knowing how to fill in those blanks because I don’t even know the title of the book or who it’s by is what makes it so haunting. I want to know if this is a universal phenomenon or if I just have a really terrible memory. Whatever the case, posting about what I can remember of these books on the subreddit “what’s that book” or trying to ask ChatGPT have never proved helpful.
For one book that I’ve been wondering about since the fifth grade, though, I finally did it. I found it and I read it again. It’s a book I wrote a poem about in 2017 because it had such an impact on me. The mood of it.
“I Think It Was a Judy Blume,” published in Cheap Pop Lit.
Story about the story I can’t remember the name of and don’t know if it actually exists about the girl whose parents get divorced and she spends weekends at the dad’s new apartment and in the apartment complex there is another girl around her age who also lives with a single parent and they become friends and spend Friday nights relaxing and washing their hair in the sink then wrapping it up in a towel in that special way that girls do and drawing a bubble bath in the bathtub and then getting in the tub together with the bubbles covering them and remembering reading this and thinking that sounds really relaxing and easy, a quiet respite with a friend who could just be a simulation of yourself that you've created in your mind to combat negative thoughts in the middle of a messy and unfamiliar situation.
I really figured it was a Judy Blume book. We had a bookshelf in my fifth grade classroom that we were allowed to browse and read from during quiet time, but I was so bored by the teacher and our lessons that I wound up reading every book on the shelf during class time. I distinctly remember the teacher calling me out for reading. “Put down the Judy Blume, Alexandra,” she said. Maybe if you wanted your students to be more engaged you should have created new lessons for us instead of making us do the same worksheet over and over Ms. Elias. Aside from that anecdote, what I remembered about the book felt like a Judy Blume book, with the emphasis on girlhood friendships, and I knew that it wasn’t Blubber or Dear God, It’s Me Margaret.
Anyway, I don’t know what took me so long but I decided to google “Judy Blume book about divorce” earlier this summer and came up with It’s Not The End of The World. I was sure I had searched those same keywords before and found nothing, so maybe the internet search gods decided to bless me for once. I borrowed the book from my local library and forgot about it for a few weeks, and then read it in an afternoon while I was bedridden due to an annoying medical issue associated with my pregnancy. It was comforting and intimate, the same as it was when I had first read it.
Thank god my weird pregnancy issue is over. All in all, it only lasted about a week. That week, though, felt like a month.
Here’s an update on what happened. In addition to the ER visit I wrote about, I ended up having to go to the doctor two different times because of the pain, and because the first two doctors I saw did not take my concerns seriously. It wasn’t until the third visit where I specifically requested to see my nurse practitioner, who has been my point of contact for this pregnancy, that I was finally heard.
When I was at the ER for the initial issue, I told the nurse who was on duty and handling my case that during my first pregnancy I had the same problem and was given a child-sized catheter because the adult-sized ones had hurt too much. I have no idea what child-sized means, or what that amounts to in however they measure catheters, but I thought this information would be useful. The nurse was just like, “okay,” and gave me a size 16 catheter because that’s all they had on hand in the ER. It was unbelievably uncomfortable, but I thought maybe it would just take some getting used to as was the case during my first pregnancy where it had taken about a day for me for me to feel somewhat normal with a medical device inside my body. This didn’t happen. Moving around was super painful, and I was pretty much bedridden for two days. There was one specific position I could lie in where I could somewhat ignore the swelling, so that’s how I stayed until I decided it was time to try to be seen again.
I made an appointment using the online portal to see a urologist at my OB-GYN office, and explained what I was experiencing in the request. After waiting in the waiting room for nearly an hour, and then after an equally lengthy intake by a resident who asked me a bunch of questions mostly unrelated to the urinary issue, they assigned me an OB-GYN who came to the exam room and listened to me explain what had happened over the past few days then said, “My job is to deliver babies. I don’t know much about catheters.” Um, great. I think I started crying. The OB-urologist on duty had some time between her scheduled appointments, so she was able to drop by during this visit and examine me briefly. She said, “Yeah, your urethra really isn’t happy,” but then offered no solution. I left the appointment feeling extremely defeated but scheduled a follow-up with the urologist for the following week to check if I was ready for the catheter to come out.
The pain and urgency involved with this kind of issue in indescribable. Even though the catheter was draining my bladder, I constantly felt like I had to go to the bathroom, so I was popping AZO for pain relief and to help me sleep. AZO is a drug that you can buy over the counter to alleviate pain associated with urinary tract infections, and you’re only meant to take it for three days. My prescription for phenazopyridine (same active ingredients as in AZO but three times stronger than the over the counter stuff) was only for three days, so I was rationing the pills and only taking them at night time.
Because I felt so messed up, I ended up messaging my nurse practitioner directly. She called me and set me up with an appointment to come in the next day. At that visit, she found a child-sized catheter in the OB-GYN office and switched it out for me. It was an immediate relief. I was able to walk home from that appointment, a feat I could not have imagined earlier that day. All it took was for someone to actually listen to me.
This is a lesson I feel like I have to relearn every so often: that I have to be my own best advocate, only I know how I feel and what I need and it’s my job to make myself heard and understood. It applies to doctor’s visits and life in general. I don’t have to accept whatever is given to me. If something feels wrong, then it probably is, and it’s on me to correct it.